Sometimes when I work in Maya, the program freezes not just Maya, but the whole computer itself. When Maya crashes, I have to shut down my computer and turn it on again. This at times can become very frustrating.

This recently happened today when I opened a scene that only had a plane, a sphere, and a volume light. It crashed when I tried to change the direction of the light. The only other program I had open was Safari at the time.

I have already tried creating a new "maya" folder, but this only minimizes the crashes, it does not get rid of them. Would I have to reinstall Maya again? Or are there other possible solutions that might fix this problem?

Originally posted by NextDesign I'm guessing that this is the mac pro?

That's very odd, but I doubt it's your video card if it's locking up like that. It could be a whole bunch of problems. Corrupted file tables, screwed up permissions, or even a hardware fault.

What you might want to do, is take a look at some system diagnostic tools, such as Techtool, or use Apple's own hardware diagnostic utilities from their website.

You're correct, I do run a Mac Pro. Well, I ran TechTool Deluxe on it this morning for all the possible tests it offered and they all passed. So it probably could be bad permissions or corrupted file tables, but I'm not sure which files could be corrupted that Maya may be needing.

I installed the Service Pack a1 for both Maya and the mental ray satellite. So far, it seems like this has solved the crashing problem (hopefully). I will try to post a log file if Maya does happen to crash again.

Neither the Radeons nor the GeForce cards are officially supported by Autodesk, but they should work fine with a few minor drawing issues, such as viewing paintFX possibly. I have heard from a number of people that Geforce cards play nicer with Maya than ATI cards, but I can't really speak to that from personal experience.

I use the Mac Pro 1,1 model and I have heard from many people that the Radeon HD 4870 works fine on these models.

The other option for my computer is to purchase the nVIDIA Quadro FX, but this card costs way too much for me at the moment. Another card, the ATI X1900 XT, I have heard can overheat (yikes!) and has caused several graphical issues that can heavily disrupt productivity.

Anyhow, I have my fingers crossed and hope this card will fix my problem!!

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